Intuitive Machines is on the moon again — and again there is some drama.
The Houston-based company’s second lunar lander, named Athena, touched down at the Mons Mouton region of the moon’s south pole on schedule today (March 6) at 12:31 p.m. EST (1731 GMT).
It wasn’t a picture-perfect landing, however. While Athena continued sending data home to Earth and began generating power on the lunar surface, the mission team could not immediately determine if it landed fully upright as planned.
“We can confirm Athena is on the surface of the moon,” Josh Marshall, Intuitive Machines’ communications director, said during the landing webcast today. “The team is going throuh the process of powering down systems that are not required. We are working to figure out the orientation of the vehicle, which is important because that will determine how much signal we’re going to have.”
It was a déjà vu moment for Intuitive Machines, which pulled off the first-ever private moon landing last year with its Odysseus spacecraft.
Odysseus came in a bit too fast during its February 2024 descent, breaking one of its legs and tipping partway over onto its side, a configuration that hampered its ability to communicate with Earth.
We’ll have to wait a bit to see if Athena suffered a similar fate. Intuitive Machines ended its landing webcast about 30 minutes after touchdown, saying more details would be provided during a press conference scheduled for 4 p.m. EST (2100 GMT) today.
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Hunting for ice near the moon’s south pole
The 13-foot-tall (4 meters) Athena launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Feb. 26. The lander’s mission, known as IM-2, is sponsored by NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, which puts agency science and technology instruments on private moon landers. The agency booked a ride on Athena for $62.5 million.
The goal is to gather a wealth of cost-effective data about the lunar environment ahead of the arrival of Artemis astronauts, who are slated to land near the lunar south pole in 2027 and later set up one or more bases in the region.
The south pole makes sense for a crewed outpost; the area is thought to harbor lots of water ice, especially on crater floors that lie in permanent shadow. Ice has been building up in these cold traps for billions of years, scientists think.
Mons Mouton is just 100 miles (160 kilometers) or so from the south pole of the moon — closer to the lunar region than any other spacecraft has landed before. If all goes according to plan, IM-2 will help researchers assess the extent and accessibility of the area’s ice, which could perhaps be used for drinking water and also split into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen to make rocket propellant.
Athena’s main payload is the Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment, or PRIME-1 for short. PRIME-1 consists of a drill designed to pull up lunar dirt from about 3 feet (0.9 meters) underground and a mass spectrometer, which will look for the signature of water ice and other interesting compounds in the sample.
“This experiment marks a significant milestone, as it will be the first robotic drilling activity conducted in the moon’s South Pole region,” Jackie Quinn, PRIME-1 project manager at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, said in a press conference on Feb. 25. “It’s a crucial step towards understanding and harnessing lunar resources to support future exploration.”
Related: The moon once had way more water than we ever imagined
Ride-along rovers and a little hopper named Grace
Athena is also carrying another spacecraft built by Intuitive Machines — a 77-pound (35-kilogram) “hopper” named Grace, after pioneering mathematician and computer scientist Grace Hopper.
If all is well with IM-2, the little hopper will deploy from Athena and then explore the area around the landing site, launching itself from place to place using its thrusters. One of those hops will take Grace into a permanently shadowed crater — a place no wheeled rover could reach.
“The idea is that, if you have a really deep crater and you want to get down into that crater, why not do it with something like a drone?” Trent Martin, senior vice president of space systems at Intuitive Machines, told reporters during a briefing on Feb. 7.
Grace isn’t the only robot that caught a ride to the lunar surface on Athena. The lander is also carrying a small rover called MAPP (Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform), which was built by the Colorado company Lunar Outpost.
MAPP is outfitted with high-resolution optical and thermal cameras. And it’s carrying a ride-along robot of its own — an “AstroAnt,” a prototype tiny swarm robot developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. AstroAnt will remain affixed to MAPP’s top thanks to its four magnetic wheels.
Athena, Grace and MAPP will stay in contact with each other using Nokia’s Lunar Surface Communication System, a payload on the lander that aims to set up the first-ever 4G/LTE network on the moon. Athena also carries a Lonestar data server on the moon as part of technology demonstration.
There’s yet another rover on board Athena as well — a 17.6-ounce (498-gram) tech-demonstrating robot called Yaoki, which was built by the Japanese company Dymon.
The IM-2 mission is expected to last for about 10 Earth days on the lunar surface. It will come to an end when the sun sets over the Mons Mouton region, depriving the solar-powered Athena of life-giving light.
All of this is contingent on Athena being healthy and oriented correctly after its lunar touchdown, of course.
Private moon exploration on the rise
IM-2 is part of a new wave of private lunar exploration. For example, Firefly Aerospace successfully put its Blue Ghost lander down in the Mare Crisium (“Sea of Crises”) region of the moon’s northern hemisphere just this past Sunday (March 2).
Blue Ghost, like Athena and Odysseus before it, is flying a CLPS mission; it holds a suite of 10 NASA science instruments that are gathering a variety of data on the lunar surface.
Blue Ghost launched on Jan. 15 with another private lunar lander — Resilience, built and operated by the Tokyo-based company ispace. Resilience is taking a longer, more looping path to the moon than either Blue Ghost or Athena; it’s expected to make its landing attempt on June 5. (Resilience is not flying a CLPS mission, but it will collect lunar dirt and rock for NASA using a microrover named Tenacious.)
“I am proud to say that this is a very busy and exciting time in lunar — and, soon, Mars — exploration, and we are anticipating an even busier cadence to come,” Niki Werkheiser, director of technology maturation at NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, said during the Feb. 25 briefing.